The quest for identity, or Why people take the news so damn personally
In April I posted on Facebook about the conflict in Ukraine, and some people got really upset with me. I'd like to share why I believe that was.
Since a few weeks before Russia launched its Special Military Operation in Ukraine, I had become somewhat obsessed with the situation in Ukraine, specifically on the enormous disconnect between what the mainstream news was saying about it and what I was seeing and hearing on independent media outlets (a couple of podcasts and some channels on Youtube). Around the time the SMO began, I created a Telegram account and started following channels there too.
It quickly became clear to me that I had not been paying enough attention to the conflict in the Donbass since it began in 2014. Our news has done a good job of almost not mentioning it for long periods, giving the strong impression that it was not happening, or at least that developments there were nothing newsworthy. Like a well-trained media consumer, I had not looked into it further. There are conflicts all over the world that I know next to nothing about, so in a sense this is no different, except that this is geographically closer to me than most, and I know a number of Ukrainians and Russians. I had heard about the 'Russian-backed separatists', but I hadn't heard about the shelling of civilians in the Donbass by Ukrainian nationalist groups (part of the National Guard, answerable to the Ukrainian Interior Ministry) and the Armed Forces of Ukraine. I had heard of the Minsk Accords, but I didn't really know what they meant.
In February, western news reported a lot on Russian troop buildups on their borders with Ukraine and with the Donbass region. What they did not report on, either at the time or since, were the Ukrainian troop buildups on the border with the Donbass - I heard about these on a podcast, but I never saw it mentioned in mainstream news. When Russia launched the SMO, it caught almost everyone by surprise.
Mainstream media called it an unprovoked attack by Russia, ignoring the claims of Ukrainian troop buildups and even of Ukrainian incursions into Russia. Russia say they had credible intelligence that Ukraine was planning to retake the Donbass at the end of February (hence the troop buildups), but of course this has only been mentioned in the news as a 'Russian claim' or 'justification for Russian aggression'. Their evidence for this was released in early March, but it was, naturally, dismissed by western media as Russian propaganda.
For days after the operation launched, I was glued to news and various social media with a constant feeling of dizzy nausea, akin to being unable to tear one's eyes away from an unfolding car crash. I attended a demonstration on Václavské Náměstí in Prague on 27th Feb in support of Ukraine, along with thousands of other people, many of them holding signs saying 'Putin=Hitler' and the like. I was there for just over an hour, in which time I saw Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala and various other celebrities or prominent Ukrainians pledge their support for Ukraine and demand that NATO 'close the skies' over Ukraine - i.e. enforce a no-fly zone, effectively forcing confrontation between NATO and Russia.
During the demonstration there were frequent calls of 'Slava Ukraini' ('Glory to Ukraine'), with the response 'Heroyam Slava' ('Glory to her heroes') from lots of people in the crowd. I found this disconcerting, because I was aware of that call-response phrase as a rallying cry of the Ukrainian nationalist movement, whom I - perhaps unfairly, perhaps not - associate primarily with their collaboration with Nazi Germany in WW2. I don't know what I expected when I went to that demonstration, but I was disheartened by it, and intimidated by the vocal presence of the Ukrainian nationalists around me.
There was something about the demeanour of the people holding the aforementioned signs - most of whom I would assume were not Ukrainian - with the yellow and blue face paint, and holding Ukrainian flags, that struck me as somehow celebratory and self-righteous, like a sombre festival. Perhaps it was because (presumably coincidentally) the events in Ukraine unfolded just as COVID restrictions began to be lifted. These people were not intimidating, but I couldn't help thinking that they were buying into an unreal version of reality, one in which Ukraine was under attack by Russia for no reason other than Putin's desire for imperial expansion, and they could now unite around a common enemy and a common friend. In the decade I've lived in Prague I have long noticed a low-level background Russophobia amongst Czechs, mostly stemming from their occupation by the Soviets in 1968, so there was no question who they would side with.
Expressing support or sympathy for the Russian perspective online might (as it did for me) result in a torrent of abuse from acquaintances; expressing it at that demonstration could have really got you hurt. There were thousands of people there - if someone had held up a Russian flag or a Z, I wonder how long it would have taken for them to be physically removed, perhaps even by police. I can't imagine that that person would get much sympathy from the crowd.
Here I get to the question of 'identity'. The demonstration came 3 days after the start of the SMO, so Facebook had already become littered with profile pictures updated with the Ukrainian flag or the #IStandWithUkraine overlay, and all posts and commentary on these were vehemently anti-Russian, as well as (to my mind) smug and mutually congratulatory for expressing the correct opinion. I unfriended one Czech friend because he posted a series of stills that appeared to show bodies in a morgue (presumably Russian soldiers) with the overlaid comment "This should be all Russians" - not even 'all Russian soldiers', although that would still have pissed me off. I sent him an uncharacteristically angry message calling him a dumb cunt and a sheep, and I sent him the infamous photo of Azov posing in front of the NATO, Ukrainian and swastika flags, with the note "your friends in Ukraine". He didn't reply.
News media, supposedly offering a variety of perspectives, presented a unified front in terms of the reporting of events. Opinions on those events may have varied slightly, but there was no disagreement on the fundamental 'facts' of what was happening - without provocation Russia was invading Ukraine, bombing cities, killing civilians. Thus the reactions to these events on social media were unanimously ones of horror and outrage, and everyone reinforced each others' reactions with approval, believing that the facts warranted it. Having your opinions approved by your peers is a sure-fire way to form a strong identity and a strong group identity, one that you know has approval and that you are approving in others.
So what if the facts that were being presented to us were incomplete, or even outright false? How will people whose identity has been formed around belief in one set of facts respond to the suggestion that those facts might not be true? Very angrily, it turns out. Suggesting that the 'facts' one has been believing are false is not just a criticism of the news media for telling you these 'facts', it's also an implicit criticism of you for believing them, especially if you have invested your own identity in repeating them and approving others' belief in them. No one wants to admit they might have been tricked, and no one wants to admit they could have been wrong. Far more likely that people who have invested themselves in one understanding of reality, will feel they have an obligation to chastise someone proposing another understanding of reality, because the alternative understanding undermines their very identity. To a sceptic it might appear as 'doubling down', but to a true believer it would feel like a responsibility. I should note that for my part, I too felt that I had a responsibility to share what I had seen, because I felt that it capably disproved the mainstream narrative.
On Facebook I posted a link to a Patrick Lancaster video of people hiding in a basement in Mariupol who said that they were hiding from shelling from 'the nazis' (i.e. Ukrainian nationalists, in this case Azov), and also to articles on Donbass Insider and elsewhere that gave detailed explanations as to why the Ukrainian side's story about the Bucha massacre and the Kramatorsk train station missile strike didn't add up. People replied to my post accusing me of "spreading bullshit" or being a "Putin/Russian propagandist". I expected this to a degree, but I must admit that I was disappointed how many of my Facebook friends approved of the criticism in the form of Likes on these comments. I asked the commenters "what bullshit?" or "what propaganda?", but I didn't get a reply. I got plenty of angry chastisement and links to news articles to read, but no specific refutation of what I had posted. This I didn't expect. Should I then assume that people think that what I posted is fake, but don't feel the need to say so, because it is so obviously fake? I find that quite a rude way to respond to your 'friend'.
On the other hand, if these people accept that what I posted is not fake, and that therefore Ukrainian forces are in fact targeting Ukrainian civilians, does that mean that they think that it is justifiable because Russia is also targeting Ukrainian civilians elsewhere? Or do the facts actually not matter, since the identity that they have constructed, or in which they partake collectively, does not need to provide proof beyond endless mainstream news articles and videos that claim to show the aftereffects of Russian bombardment? The only conversations I got into with any of the commenters seemed to descend into doubts about the reliability or moral character of the people I was sourcing: the aforementioned Lancaster, and Gonzalo Lira, whom I discovered at the start of the conflict. Their criticisms of these sources were based on articles (I would call them hit-pieces) that were found on the first page of a Google search for the person's name, which I pointed out did not make them impartial, but my scepticism was ignored. The articles seemed to me to be quite obviously heavily biased, and in Lira's case brought up a number of his tweets that he had posted as his past incarnation as Coach Red Pill, giving advice on life and relationships to young men. Some of it was pretty cringeworthy and embarrassing, but none of it had anything to do with current events in Ukraine - but that didn't matter to his detractors. All that mattered was that his tweets proved that he was an asshole and thus shouldn't be taken seriously on anything, and since I do take him seriously, I guess that extended to me, too. It all felt eerily reminiscent of criticism of Trump.
Another former Facebook friend who is heavily invested in being a 'Ukraine supporter' (can I coin the term Ukrainiac?) replied to a comment in a group conversation with blue and yellow hearts, when the comment had nothing to do with Ukraine. I realised then that this identity is totalising, and to a degree infantilising. For a while, simply wearing blue and yellow clothes could be seen as showing support for Ukraine, but one would never need to explain exactly how that support helps Ukraine, the same as one would never need to explain how changing a profile picture on social media helps. The important thing is that everyone KNOWS you support Ukraine - it is, to use a tarnished internet phrase, 'virtue signalling'.
That could easily apply to everything that one posts on social media, so was I also virtue signalling by posting the very opposite, that the media are lying to us and the Ukrainian army is attacking their own people? Am I secretly hoping that everyone will realise their mistake later on and admit that I was right, at which point I can bask in my rightness? Well, I do think that I am right, but the way I rationalise my behaviour is that I felt a need to share what I believed was a very inconvenient truth. I felt that sharing it is supporting the people of Ukraine, even if it is in just as ephemeral a sense as people saying the opposite.
I'm certainly not immune from allowing my online identity to inform my real identity. Everything I know about the Ukraine situation, I have learnt online. I have taken a position on it online and other people have attacked or defended me online, and I them. I tried not to take the news personally, but when one is ridiculed for questioning it, it is very hard not to.
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